There is a ninety-seven point six percent chance of failure.

(SPOILERS) Rogue One: A Star Wars Story failed to tantalise me from the
announcement of its premise onwards, smacking of the kind of joining the dots
exercise that has been the bane of many an ill-advised prequel. And the
trailers did nothing to reverse that, lacking even a hint of a character to invest
in. The finished film proves both better and worse than those expectations
suggested, not quite as limp in its
main cast, but depressingly in thrall to distracting dollops of continuity
spooned up every couple of minutes. Mainly, though, its faults lie in style
over content.

Which isn’t a surprise; this is an
incredibly well-made movie, but if cinematic legerdemain was where it was at,
director Gareth Edwards’s previous picture, Godzilla,
would be the blockbuster of the last
decade. Whatever reshoots may or may not have been supervised by Tony Gilroy
(credited co-screenwriter with Chris “American
Pie and making damn sure The Golden
Compass went belly-up” Weitz), fortunately it’s Edwards’ stylistic
fingerprints that are evident throughout.

Because, whatever his faults as a
storyteller – and they become more evident with each new movie – Edwards’
visual sense is impeccable. Rogue One
is gorgeous to behold, blessed with seamless CGI that only ever feels
integrated (with one glaring exception that has been much discussed already,
and obviously will be here). He’s without peer in martialling the elements to foster
verisimilitude, from rain-lashed mountain ranges, to sun-kissed beaches, to
vertiginous instillations overlooking the same; there’s real depth and
substance here.

As such, this is the most “Star Wars”-looking picture in the series
– for all its inclinations toward realism and penchant for handheld camera –
since The Empire Strikes Back, and the
first since that outing to really feel of a piece with the environment of the
first two in the original trilogy (the slipshod carelessness of Return of the Jedi lets it down at times
in that regard; at points, it ends up looking like just another ’80s fantasy
movie). This in itself may be seen as part and parcel of the trap Edwards has
fallen into – of replicating rather than extending – but in this aspect, at
least, I think he has a right to be proud of his achievement.

It also lends Rogue One the strongest sense of the occupied worlds of the Empire
– or just populated worlds, period – in
the series. The environments here take the Mos Eisley of the original and
multiply by ten, discarding the virtual landscapes of the prequels and the
inability to do anything but a sideways homage in The Force Awakens. The picture scores too by envisaging normal people in the ranks of the Empire
– something The Force Awakens
singularly failed at with its basic-training-and-out ex-Stormtrooper. Jyn Erso’s
father Galen (Mads Mikkelsen) is a dutiful Imperial officer but not the embodiment of evil or the good
guys’ cannon fodder, and this is arguably the first time the series has been
willing to go there.

Similar is the attempt at striking balance through
having lead male protagonist Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) showing off the dark
side of the Rebellion during the opening scenes (although he’s only dispatching
reliably plankish actor Daniel Mays, so he’s not to be thought too ill of) and later
with orders to assassinate anyone who may undermine the Rebellion’s grand
scheme, white hats included (Forrest Whitaker, meanwhile, is quite comfortable
using torture for his just cause). For all that the prequel trilogy attempted
to embroil itself in the nuance of political machinations and the downturn of
its lead character, what transpires in Rogue
One is perhaps the biggest break of faith with Lucas’ vision thus far,
particularly given how he went overboard trying to retcon the likes of Han when
it came to ensuring his heroes really were impossibly heroic (but then,
apparently he gave Edwards his tuna-necked seal of approval, so who knows where
his head’s at? Perhaps he just didn’t like JJ put Georgy in the corner, so
vocally approving of Rogue One was
payback?)

These elements are hung on a strictly
perfunctory plot, which doesn’t matter very much initially; the reasons for
wanting to involve Jyn makes sense, but as Weitz and Gilroy struggle to inhabit
the slender time and space they have presented themselves, they invoke ever
more glaringly hackneyed devices. This includes the Alliance refusing the
opportunity to take action so our intrepid band of misfits can rise to the impossibly-against-the-odds
challenge themselves, which they do with remarkable ease until they start
dropping like flies on cue, as the stakes rise inexorably.

While congratulations are in order for at
least not copping out at this point, and proceeding on course to a nominal downer,
the movie ends up occupying a strangely ambivalent place, where the sacrifices are
revealed as of negligible consequence because so much packaged continuity has
been lined up to fill all available gaps and squeeze out any tragedy; it turns out
the industry fanboys were only pretending they wanted to tell this story, when
really they were creaming themselves to signpost what happens next in the least
artful manner.

Which isn’t to say the grand climax isn’t
reasonably effective in and of itself; while many of the supporting characters
are dispensed with in a way that reflects how little substance they were imbued
with in the first place, the trio of droid K-2SO, Jyn and Cassian are thrust effectively
into a “Can they succeed?” bid to snatch the plans. A bid only in danger of being
undermined by the typically over-resourced bombastic battle sequence that serves
mostly to recall how every other Star
Wars movie (apart from the best one) climaxes. It’s a sequence that also
suggests, even if the Empire didn’t have a boffin helpfully undermining their
superweapon, some other crippling flaw would be bound to surface; how else to
explain their mighty Star Destroyers that seem entirely inept at manoeuvring
and prone to ramming each other (on top of their not-so-very-effective
walkers)?

K-S2O: (after Jyn zaps a lookalike)
Did you know that wasn’t me?

The big problem, though, is that we don’t
really care about any of them, Alan Tudyk’s marvellously acerbic droid aside.
Tudyk, as about the only source of humour in the piece (Chirrut’s line about
having a bag on his head aside), rightly steals every scene he’s in, even if
all his lines don’t absolutely land, and also manages to convey the only
emotionally consequential scene as he sacrifices himself in a blaze of glory.
The design concept for K-S2O is striking as Tudyk’s vocal range, at which he’s
a past master, of course, including I Robot’s
title character more than a decade ago.

Chirrut
Îmwe: I
am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.

It’s surely no coincidence that the droid
is both the best character and the
only character with larger-than-life flamboyance in the group. The trappings of
nominal realism just don’t mesh if they’re made to wash over every aspect of the
Star Wars universe. Donnie Yen as
Force-wannabe Chirrut Îmwe isn’t
interesting as a character, only in respect of the thematic quality he imparts,
which is actually quite compelling and distinctive for a mainstream
blockbuster; it’s the old Salieri thing of “Why doesn’t God talk to me?”, but
played through a man who, even though the Force is silent within him, never forsakes
his belief in it (his “Make it so” mantra smacks either of desperate clutching
at straws or stoic wilfulness). He and best buddy Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen; in
the year of gay Sulu, the relationship between Chirrut and Baze is surely a coy
sop to calls for more inclusive representation in the Star Wars universe), are rather dull, but his article of faith might
be the most provocative element of the picture.

Luna is vague but inoffensive as the lead
male protagonist, mainly there to represent the flawed hero (everyone here is
flawed, you know, because they’re determinedly not staunch Lucas archetypes, just dull stereotypes), but really
it’s all about Felicity. Who rightly got attention for The Theory of Everything but comes entirely unstuck here, with just
the one expression – that of a pouting gerbil, and a miserablist pouting gerbil
at that – and the same number of gradations in performance. The attempts to
beef up her motivation and backstory don’t really carry, and her big speech is
unmitigated tripe, likely written by someone who thought Keira Knightley’s pep
talk in At World’s End was something
to steer for on the rousing front.

There other actors are all fine, but all
ultimately kind of forgettable – Forest Whitaker being Forest Whitaker, The new
Exorcist Ben Daniels sporting a ‘70s tache and stuck behind an X-wing, and Riz Ahmed getting to wig out a bit.

Mads is okay as dad, but can never get out
from under the underwritten misdirected-but-well-intentioned-scientist trope.
And Ben Mendelsohn is also okay as Director Krennic, but he can never get out from under his virtual and masked superiors,
who undermine not only the character but also the actor. So much time is spent
getting to points where Krennic can be given orders by not-Tarkin or have his
throat tugged by not-Darth that his actual motivation is reduced to a sliver of
rage here and a slice of sadism there; nothing to rely relish, or top with
garnish.

And this is where Rogue One suffers the most. Or the most obviously (one might
charitably suggest it takes the heat of flaws elsewhere). I don’t know if the
decision to stuff the movie with continuity came earlier or later – most
probably it was always there, as you don’t get a facsimile Peter Cushing in
four months of post-reshoots CG-tweaking – but God, do all the different Easter eggs
grate.

There’s occasionally something that’s quite
intriguing, such as seeing Darth in his burns tank, but then we’re “treated” to
him in full swing, so to speak, with a costume and mask that look very off, a
performer who’s too squat and just plain doesn’t move right – suddenly I have
new found respect for the much mocked Dave Prowse – and a James Earl Jones
sound less a threatening force planning to do something deadly than an old guy
desperate to put his feet up and have a nice snooze in the dialogue booth. It
doesn’t quite have the despairing effect that the Yoda the Hedgehog had in Attack of the Clones, but it’s still
just not right.

It’s bizarre that Vader – relatively simple
to replicate, or should be – ends up so wrong when so much time was clearly put
into reproducing the visage of Peter Cushing, whose reproduction is so near in
some respects that the result is even further from succeeding in all the ways
that count. There is never a moment where Grand Moff Tarkin lulls you into not being distracted, which renders all
his scenes entirely pointless.He just isn’t Cushing, and isn’t Tarkin, and there’s something ghoulishly disrespectful about
the whole decision that leaves a bad taste in the mouth (and what’s with his
big baggy trousers, like something out of one of those Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars toons?) When we finally come
to rest against the iceberg cameo of a young Carrie-GI Fisher, complete with
coke trails, we’ve gone long past the sinking feeling of sad inevitability, and
there’s a realisation that this isn’t just Star
Wars nostalgia; the attempt to recover yesteryear in the least creative,
sadly counterfeit way appears to be pervading every movie currently coming out
of Hollywood, to varying degrees of irritation or indignation.

And, in tandem with this obsessiveness,
there’s something laughably askew about how patchy such obeisance to past
iconography is when the actor playing Mon Mothma looks absolutely nothing like
the original (clue: here she sports a bleedin’ great beaky nose) and has only
been cast because she was in a deleted scene in Revenge of the Sith (besides which, Genevieve O’Reilly is a good
decade younger than Caroline Blakiston was), or when Jimmy Smits strolls on
looking barely a day older than he did in The
Phantom Menace, let alone Revenge of
the Sith, and we’re somehow expected to believe that, in this brief gap of
time, Ewan McGregor spent so much time getting so windswept in the Jundland Wastes
he ended up as Alec Guinness. The more Lucasfilm (whoever is in charge of it at
whatever point in time) attempts to gather the strands together, the more they
slip through their fingers.

And then
there’s the R2-D2 and C-3PO cameo, unnecessary in the extreme, and the “You just better watch yourself” guy,
clearly on a month-long, galaxy-wide bender (while I’m a Star Wars fan, I’m not such
a fan that I know the actual names of Pig-Face and his Toothsome pal). It
appears that you can turn down any given street in this far, far away place, a
long time ago and there’s always minor A
New Hope character lurking. By the end of the move, the only surprise is
that we didn’t discover whether Leia went for a Number One or a Number Two
immediately prior to taking delivery of the Death Star plans. The parts that are pleasantly nostalgic – the sound
effects and retro computer graphics – are the too rare ones that slip you into
the mood of the first movie without rubbing your face in it. Alas, the problem
is that every series movie these days
devolves into fan fiction, even if it has the official stamp on it, and there’s
no one sensible around to say “No, that’s going too far”.

I’d like to be more charitable to Michael
Giacchino’s score; it certainly does lots and lots of John Williams quoting,
but I’d rather he’d come up with something as individual and distinct as his Star Trek reboot, which had great themes
to spare and didn’t have you thinking
about the original at all. Here, the one notably original element, the main
riff, is terrible. It’s like some kind of Churchillian foghorn from a ‘40s-propaganda
movie, and fails spectacularly to do anything but take you right out of the
proceedings – I was slightly aghast on hearing it, wondering if they were
really serious, hoping something decent might come along if I’d only give it a
few seconds.

Rogue
One: A Star Wars Story is nothing so much as one of
those tales Marvel comics would offer back in the ’70 and ’80s (and which other
licensees have no doubt done many times since), filling in the gaps between
movies (albeit, then they mostly were
between movies), or relaying a short story about how Wedge Antilles escaped
Hoth, even though he looked absolutely nothing like Wedge Antilles. That, I
seem to recall, was an interestingly little diversion, but nothing more. And so
it is here; the only way you can make this story truly work is if you care
about those involved, but aside from Tudyk’s droid, you absolutely don’t. And
neither did the makers. They cared about the shout-outs to Darth and the
not-so-Grand Moff and Leia and R2 and 3PO. And in another two years we’ll be
getting the same thing all over again with Han and Lando and Chewie and the
Falcon and the Kessel Run and maybe even a cameo from Lobot, with a virtual
John Hollis… Lobot ROCKS, of course, but not
a virtual Lobot.

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